17 February 2025 · Shift 2

Disinvestment of PSUs Correct option: (c) To generate revenue for the government. Disinvestment is the sale of the government's own shareholding in a public sector enterprise; the money it fetches is a capital receipt that helps the Centre meet its expenditure without fresh borrowing. It is managed by the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) under the Ministry of Finance, which handles both minority stake sales and strategic sales such as Air India in 2021-22. The other three options are the opposite of its purpose: disinvestment brings private capital and private management in, it loosens government control, and it aims to raise efficiency, not reduce it.

Khel Ratna Award Correct option: (a) 1994-95. Weightlifter Karnam Malleswari was given the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna - renamed the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award in 2021 - for the year 1994-95, the period in which she won her world championship titles. She had received the Arjuna Award in 1994 and the Padma Shri in 1999, and at Sydney 2000 she took bronze in the 69 kg class to become the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal. Memory hook: the Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, was instituted in 1991-92 with Viswanathan Anand as its first recipient, so its early awards are always written as split years.

State Planning Board Correct option: (d) Chief Minister. A State Planning Commission (State Planning Board) is the planning body of the State government, and the Chief Minister is its ex officio chairman; a Deputy Chairman or Vice-Chairman runs its day-to-day work. This copies the Union pattern: the Prime Minister chaired the Planning Commission from 1950 to 2014 and is the ex officio Chairperson of NITI Aayog, which replaced it on 1 January 2015. So the Governor (the constitutional head of the State), the Finance Minister and the Chief Secretary (the senior-most civil servant) are all ruled out - the political head of the State government takes the chair.

Adult literacy scheme Correct option: (d) 2022-23. The New India Literacy Programme (NILP) is a centrally sponsored scheme of the Ministry of Education approved for five financial years, from 2022-23 to 2026-27, and it replaced the earlier Saakshar Bharat programme. It is meant for non-literates aged 15 years and above and works through five components: foundational literacy and numeracy, critical life skills, basic education, vocational skills and continuing education. Memory hook: NILP flows from the National Education Policy 2020 and is publicised as ULLAS - Nav Bharat Saaksharta Karyakram - so its start year comes just after NEP 2020, in 2022-23.

Folk dances of India Correct option: (d) Goa. Kunbi is the dance of the Kunbi (Gawda) tribal community of Goa, performed by women in the knotted Kunbi saree, usually before the paddy sowing of the monsoon. Goa's other folk forms - Fugdi, Dhalo, Goff, Ghode Modni and Dekhni - belong to the same village-festival tradition, so a Goan dance name is best remembered in that cluster. Each distractor state has its own signature dance instead: Chholiya in Uttarakhand, Singhi Chham in Sikkim and Ghumura in Odisha.

Wohler's urea synthesis Correct option: (a) cyanic acid. In 1828 Friedrich Wohler prepared ammonium cyanate from cyanic acid and ammonia and, on heating it, obtained urea: $N{H}_{4}OCN\to CO{\left(N{H}_2\right)}_2$. Urea is an organic compound made here entirely from inorganic starting material, which destroyed the vital-force (vitalism) theory that organic substances could arise only inside living bodies; the experiment is treated as the birth of organic chemistry. The other acids listed - hydroiodic, valeric and perchloric - have no role in this synthesis; the acid must be the one whose ammonium salt is ammonium cyanate, that is, cyanic acid.

International Solar Alliance Correct option: (d) Ashish Khanna. At the Seventh Session of the ISA Assembly, held in New Delhi in November 2024, Ashish Khanna of India was selected as Director General of the International Solar Alliance for a four-year term. He succeeded Dr Ajay Mathur, who had led the Alliance since 2021 - the other three options simply swap the first name of one man with the surname of the other, so read both halves of the name before answering. The ISA was launched by India and France at the Paris climate conference (COP21) in 2015 and is headquartered at Gurugram, Haryana, the first international organisation with its headquarters in India.

Padma Shri dancers Correct option: (d) Narthaki Nataraj. Narthaki Nataraj of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, is India's first transgender Bharatanatyam exponent and the first transgender woman to be awarded the Padma Shri, which she received in 2019. She was trained by Guru K P Kittappa Pillai in the Thanjavur Nayaki Bhava style, won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2011, and was later given an honorary doctorate for her work in Bharatanatyam; her life story was put into the Tamil Nadu Class XI Tamil textbook in 2018. Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, the tempting choice, is a transgender rights activist and Kinnar Akhara mahamandaleshwar - well known, but neither a Bharatanatyam dancer nor a Padma Shri awardee.

Sectors of the economy Correct option: (d) Tourism industry. A service (tertiary) industry produces no physical good; it supplies a service. Tourism sells transport, stay, food and guiding, so it belongs to the service sector. Textiles and iron and steel turn raw material into goods and construction builds physical assets, so all three sit in the secondary sector, not the tertiary one. Memory hook: primary extracts, secondary makes, tertiary serves.

Carnatic instruments Correct option: (d) Veena. Emani Sankara Sastry (1922-1987) was a Carnatic vainika who fixed a contact microphone to his veena so that its soft, sustained tone could carry in a large hall and in film recording. The veena is the plucked string instrument of Carnatic music, linked with Goddess Saraswati; the Saraswati veena made at Thanjavur is its standard form. The distractors belong elsewhere: the sarangi (bowed) and the sarod (plucked) are Hindustani instruments, and the mandolin entered Carnatic music much later, through U Srinivas.

Fundamental Duties Correct option: (b) 2002. The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserted Article 51A(k), the eleventh Fundamental Duty: it is the duty of every parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education to his child or ward between the ages of six and fourteen years. The same amendment added Article 21A, which makes free and compulsory education of children aged 6 to 14 a Fundamental Right, and recast Article 45 to cover early childhood care and education. 1976 is the trap: the 42nd Amendment created Part IVA with the first ten duties, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee.

Neighbours of India Correct option: (c) Pakistan. Pakistan's official name is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and its Constitution of 1973 declares Islam the State religion, so among the four neighbours listed only Pakistan has a State religion of Islam. Sri Lanka and Myanmar give Buddhism the foremost place, and Nepal has been a secular State since 2008, when it stopped being the world's only Hindu kingdom. Bangladesh and the Maldives are the other neighbours with Islam as the State religion, but neither appears among the options.

Mahajanapadas Correct option: (c) 16. The Buddhist text Anguttara Nikaya names sixteen mahajanapadas that flourished in northern India between about the 6th and 4th centuries BCE; the Jaina Bhagavati Sutra also gives a list of sixteen. They include Magadha, Kosala, Vatsa and Avanti - the four that grew strongest - and Magadha finally swallowed the rest under its Haryanka, Shishunaga and Nanda rulers. Memory hook: the 'solah mahajanapadas' belong to the second urbanisation, the same age that produced Buddhism and Jainism and the first punch-marked coins.

Cricket ball specification Correct option: (d) 163. Law 4 of the Laws of Cricket fixes the men's ball at not less than 155.9 g (5.5 oz) and not more than 163 g (5.75 oz), with a circumference of 22.4 cm to 22.9 cm. Memory hook: the standard ball is the 5.5 to 5.75 ounce ball, and 5.75 oz works out to 163 g; the women's and junior balls are lighter, so 163 g is the ceiling only for the men's ball.

Tribal festivals Correct option: (a) Arunachal Pradesh. Reh is the festival of the Idu-Mishmi tribe, held on 1 and 2 February, and Boori Boot (Boori Boot Yullo) is celebrated by the Hill Miri and Nyishi people - both tribes of Arunachal Pradesh. The State's festival calendar is tribe-wise: Losar (Monpa), Mopin (Galo), Solung (Adi), Nyokum (Nyishi), Dree (Apatani) and Torgya (Tawang monastery). Memory hook: Arunachal Pradesh has the largest number of recognised tribes in the North-East, so a festival name drawn from a tribal tongue rather than from Sanskrit usually belongs to it - Gujarat has Navratri, Himachal the Kullu Dussehra and Assam Bihu.

World's longest rivers Correct option: (b) North-Eastern Africa. The Nile flows northward through north-eastern Africa - Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt - and empties into the Mediterranean Sea through a delta near Cairo; at about 6,695 km it is traditionally called the world's longest river. Its two arms meet at Khartoum: the White Nile, rising from Lake Victoria, gives the steady year-round flow, and the Blue Nile, rising from Lake Tana in Ethiopia, brings most of the water and silt of the flood season. The distractor continents belong to other rivers - the Amazon to South America, the Ob-Irtysh and Yenisei to northern Asia, and the Volga and Danube to Europe.

Aligarh Movement Correct option: (a) Syed Ahmed Khan. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan led the Aligarh Movement, which urged Indian Muslims to accept modern Western education and scientific thinking instead of staying away from English schooling. He founded the Scientific Society in 1864 to translate Western works into Urdu, brought out the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq for social reform, and set up the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875, which became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. The other three belong to later politics: Shaukat Ali to the Khilafat Movement, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to the Congress and to independent India's education ministry, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the Muslim League.

Father of Indian Statistics Correct option: (c) Father of Indian Statistics. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata in 1931, devised the Mahalanobis distance and built India's large-scale sample survey system, which is why he is called the Father of Indian Statistics. He also drew up the Mahalanobis model that guided the Second Five Year Plan (1956-61) and its emphasis on heavy industry. Memory hook: his birthday, 29 June, is observed as National Statistics Day. The Father of the Green Revolution in India is M S Swaminathan, the New Economic Policy of 1991 is associated with Dr Manmohan Singh, and the RBI was set up in 1935 on the Hilton Young Commission's recommendation.

Smoke point of oils Correct option: (a) smoke point. The smoke point, also called the burning point, is the temperature at which a heated oil or fat starts to break down and give off a continuous bluish smoke, leaving a burnt flavour in the food. It rises with refining and falls as free fatty acids build up, so a repeatedly reused oil smokes at a lower temperature; mustard and rice-bran oils have high smoke points while butter has a low one. The distractors name different quantities: boiling point is where a liquid turns to vapour, ignition (flash) temperature is where the vapour actually catches fire, and critical temperature is the temperature above which a gas cannot be liquefied by pressure alone.

Diplomatic appointments Correct option: (a) Vinay Mohan Kwatra. Vinay Mohan Kwatra, an Indian Foreign Service officer of the 1988 batch, was appointed India's Ambassador to the United States of America in July 2024, immediately after finishing his term as Foreign Secretary (May 2022 to July 2024). He had earlier served as India's Ambassador to France and to Nepal, and in Washington he succeeded Taranjit Singh Sandhu. The other names point the wrong way: Nancy J Powell and Richard R Verma were United States Ambassadors to India, and Binay Ranjan Sen was an Indian envoy of the 1950s who later headed the FAO.